by Tom O'Neill
‘You know where you can put that,’ she said.
‘Tell me what is the nature of fear,’ he asked.
‘I don’t know what you are raving about,’ she said, without a moment’s hesitation. ‘But if I knew where there was a field of it, I wouldn’t tell you.’
In a flash, the purple-clad man moved his hand towards her. He used no weapon and not even a fist. He used his hand like a paw, striking her only with the palm. But with that one strike, he turned her head inside out. He then got back on his horse and the party rode around her as she lay on the path. As he passed, he looked down at her and said, ‘That’s fear for you.’
That was how Matha became aware of a new force at work in his country. He had seen and heard something unnatural inside that little man. He wasn’t quite sure why he had been able to see it but he was fairly sure this was something that Mac Cumhaill and Cormac would like to know about.
He went to the woman to see if he could help her. Somehow or other she was still swearing from the back of her head. Very little fear on her after all. So he had to leave her there, as he had had enough misfortune without having to carry more curses on his shoulders. He called in at the nearby settlement to inform them that they would be a while waiting for the sticks as their woman was on the boreen in some uncertainty about whether to go backwards or forwards. The woman’s father was a madman who chased him with a stick, saying, ‘What class of a man do you call yourself, deserting a sweet young girl after you got her in trouble on the road?’
Matha resumed his journey, but with more haste.
On this occasion he again met the little charioteer. Again, the goat came up on him so fast and soundless that he had no warning of the lady’s approach. The thin-faced woman who had previously advised him of the exact location of Mac Cumhaill’s stronghold, again spoke to him without greeting. ‘You are going to Tara again?’
Again Matha greeted her politely and was rewarded with useful information.
She said sternly, ‘On this occasion too, there would be no point in you going there.’
‘Mac Cumhaill is at home again? Well, I can just as well go and warn Cormac then.’
‘Cormac is not there either,’ said the woman. ‘Bad times have descended on Tara some six months past. Cormac has been banished. Mac Cumhaill has been defeated and is sitting in his bed feeling sore for himself. There is a new king and things are very bad in the country.’
‘A small man in purple robes and a sheep stealer’s face?’
‘That’s him. How did you know?’
‘I saw him a way back on this road not a few hours ago,’ said Matha.
‘That’s not possible son, he never leaves the castle for fear of being attacked. He knows he is not very popular.’
Matha didn’t argue with the woman. ‘Well I noticed something peculiar about the purple-robed impostor, but the warning I had for Cormac is obviously too late then,’ he said. ‘Maybe I should go and talk to Mac Cumhaill anyway.’
‘You should. There is no doubt about that.’
Matha took the same detour as before, cutting across to the east, and headed for the mountain fortress. This time the guards remembered him. He was taken straight to Mac Cumhaill’s cabin. There, he was shocked to find that what the woman said was true. Mac Cumhaill was barely sitting up on a straw mattress. But it was hardly laziness or self-pity that kept him there, as the lady had implied. After the welcomes, which were very subdued this time, Matha again told how he had been directed here.
‘Wait,’ said Conán, who was also present, ‘this woman that you talked to, was the fur stole brown and grey?’
‘It was.’
‘And she had a rather sharp face, one you wouldn’t wish to see on a cold morning?’
‘I suppose. Who is she and why does it matter anyway, whoever she is? Is it not more important for you to know of the reason I came?’
‘Only important,’ interrupted bald-headed old warrior Goll Mac Morna, who had been sitting next to Mac Cumhaill’s subdued hearth, ‘to explain to us who you really are.’ He was now standing and approaching Matha with his hand on his sword and no kindness in his face.
‘What do you mean?’ said Matha, terrified. ‘You all know who I am.’
‘That’s enough, Goll,’ intervened Mac Cumhaill, calling Matha to his bedside. He spoke in a whisper. ‘The thing is this, Matha. The person you talked to does not appear to most people in human form. She is a weasel. I too have spoken to the noble lady but most people here believe there is some form of dark spirit at work in the hearts of men who claim to have communicated with her. Mention of her can scare men into thinking you are allied with the other side. So it’s best you don’t speak of her again, but just take the information she gives you as your own.’ Then he spoke in a voice that everyone could hear: ‘Now sit down, have a mug of goat milk, and then when you have gathered your wits you can tell us what else you saw on your travels and what brought you here.’
Matha thanked Oonagh who brought the mug of goat milk. Before putting it to his lips he said, ‘The first thing that brought me back to you was to again beg for help from a druid. I went to my home place the day I last parted from you, fully intending to fix my problems there and settle back. But the place where my valley used to be, I cannot find. It is gone. I have spent this whole year looking for it. Then I decided that before I lost what remained of my sanity and condemned myself to forever be known as a poor demented hill tramp, I should come back to you and see if there was advice you could give.’
‘You had better drink the milk and have a feed of cake as well,’ said Diarmuid, another of Mac Cumhaill’s closest. ‘Because that kind of problem you describe, even to me who doesn’t know much about enchantment, sounds like a serious geis has been put upon your head. A geis that can make a person walk forever, never able to stay in one place, never able to return to his home. If there is help to be had from the druids, they will certainly make a rigmarole and a series of riddles of telling you what it is and it will probably take you a deal of time and patience to work through it. That’s just the way these priests dish out their penances.’
‘What was the other thing you thought we might need to know?’ asked Mac Cumhaill.
‘It was that I saw this man, who I am told is the new king, on the road not far from Mount Laigin today.’
‘Now we know he’s a lying impostor,’ shouted Goll, standing up again and this time pulling out his sword. Just as swiftly, Conán jumped in between Matha and Goll, saying, ‘Put that knife away before I bury it in you!’
‘I already know,’ Matha said. ‘The lady... I mean to say, I already know that you think it impossible for me to have seen him so far from Tara. I already know that he never travels out for fear of the people he rules so cruelly. But I have no time for lies. I have no explanation. I am just telling you what I did see. I saw a fussy little man in grand robes with a crown on his head and several soldiers around him. And I observed that although he looked as weak as a lamb, he struck out with the speed of a cat and the strength of a bull, turning a poor woman’s head inside out with one touch.’
‘Well, Goll,’ Conán laughed loud, ‘don’t you think you might want to withdraw your accusations of lying?’
‘And what is more,’ Matha continued, ignoring Goll’s averted head, ‘I can tell you something that maybe you do not know. When he struck out, I saw and heard someone else. There was someone... something... inside him.’
There were things that Matha was saying that seemed too strange, even for himself to believe. But he was getting used to hearing himself saying strange things, so he was not hesitant anymore.
In this instance at least, Matha was not suffering from any kind of derangement. The reason Fionn Mac Cumhaill was in the situation in which Matha found him had indeed to do with a sheep dealer who had overthrown the King. Up till this night, nobody had begun to suspect how this had been done.
It had started at around Bealtaine that same year.
; The Magillas were a family of sleeveens that lived near Corofin over in the West. They were sheep dealers, distrusted far and wide. They talked copiously but it was all worthless sound. They had no word. They were best known for lying, bullying, borrowing and never paying a fair price for anything. There was a big litter of them in it and they considered themselves a little army in their own part of the world.
Most times the exploits of the small Magilla army were not ambitious. They were content to threaten local farmers and travellers. Generally they had the good sense to be sweet to anyone who might bite back. When they did ‘go to war’ with neighbours, their cowardice made them dangerous as they would attack like rats, surrounding their unfortunate victim as they each took a dig at him.
A lowly breed, most would agree. Not themselves though. In the view of the Magillas they were displaced royalty. They would tell anyone who could listen to them, which was mostly just each other, that the elder Magilla was the rightful heir to Tara.
Their story was that Conn who was King Cormac’s grandfather had loved the elder Magilla’s mother. And that Conn’s first-born son was in fact the elder Magilla, not Airt, Cormac’s father. Even if their story had been true, nobody could blame Conn for having denied it in outrage. The elder Magilla had been born with a sly begrudging frown that no parent who had a choice would want any part of.
Only once long before had the Magillas ever made an attempt to put the elder Magilla in a position they considered fitting. That incident had cemented their resentment towards the High King, Cormac, and even more so against his defenders, Mac Cumhaill and Conán. That time, they had hired a fine oak craftsman to make a throne for old Magilla. And in their usual way, they found fault with the work when it was finished so they could chase the man away without paying. They trained all the younger ones in the use of spears and hatchets. Then they hid their weapons on a cart and made their way like poor travelling people with their heads bowed, to the small fortress of the King of the West. He was a man who drank a lot of mead and had no army as he gave no thought to the idea that anyone in their right heads might want to take over the heartache of running his poor kingdom.
When the Magillas sneaked in that night, they met no resistance from the King, only confusion. They brought in their fine throne and the elder Magilla up on it. They might even have got away with it if they had left it at that, as the deposed King seemed relieved enough about the situation.
But then they had found a brehon who was very amenable to anyone who could keep drink supplied into him. They got him to draft laws for the new Magilla Kingdom of the West. The first law was that any storyteller whose tales did not amuse the elder Magilla would be skewered with a sharpened oar and left to die slowly.
Although Mac Cumhaill was of the view that there were too many storytellers, he could not allow Magilla to start murdering them just for their bad lies. So he went to Corofin with Conán and took the sharpened sticks from all of the Magilla lads and girls. Conán reinforced the message for them by ramming the meat they had been feasting on down their throats using the stout ends of their stick spears. As Mac Cumhaill left them that time, all he said to old Magilla was, ‘You may well be right that there are enough storytellers and poets in the country. But by the same measure, there are also more than enough kings.’
Mac Cumhaill wasn’t certain why the Magilla clan bore the resentment against the Fianna for so long. But Conán’s parting gesture that time had not helped. The elder Magilla was sitting on the throne and still complaining, ‘We were not even claiming our rightful place in Tara, but merely taking a small local kingdom as consolation.’ He then spat across the room and directly into Fionn’s eye. Conán, who was very young and prone to anger at the time, lifted the throne with the little old twisty rejected son of Conn still sitting in it. He took it outside and ran to Lough Meask with it. He didn’t throw it to the very centre of the lake but close enough. The little man had a good chance to cool down as he floated and spluttered his way back to shore.
The great cheer from local people who had gathered only added to the insult that festered into dangerous bitterness in the royal family of Corofin for years to come, creating fertile ground for the events that Matha had recently witnessed.
It was Mac Cumhaill’s observation that people who were capable of nothing honest or useful in life are generally able to hold a grudge for generations longer than ordinary decent people. So it was with the Magillas. For a while they contented themselves with paying a rogue púca for doing mischief on neighbours – preventing cows from going in calf, stopping hens from laying, making crops rot in the ground and any other bad things that came into their minds. They were shrewd enough to always pay this craftsman in full for his work.
Sensible people kept their distance from the Magillas, trying not to deal with them but also trying not to cross them because you didn’t want to bring that kind of misfortune on your head.
Despite all, they still thought highly of themselves. The elder Magilla’s ambitions had been transferred to his son, Bolg, the current headman of the fine. In their own house, anyone they considered of their own rank would be welcomed warmly. Anyone else would be met with a poor mouth and tales of misery and hardship, but never with a smell of hospitality. And in the privacy of their own discourse, the Magillas resented most people, those they thought their betters, their equals, and their lessers. Most of all they hated Fionn Mac Cumhaill, Conán Mac Liath and the Fianna for keeping Bolg from his birthright.
They would sit around their fire and at one time or another every single night the talk would come around to cursing Fionn Mac Cumhaill. They would tell each other that they could easily beat him if they set their minds to it. They would pray for sickness and defeat to fall on him and on all his family. But when any outsider was near, they would pretend that the old thing with the throne was long behind them and that they were the most loyal supporters of Cormac and his men.
Mac Cumhaill had known of some of this festering ill will because the larks and the wrens would carry stories to him. But he didn’t pay attention. The Magillas weren’t the only ones in the world who didn’t like him and generally his policy was to let such people be. Let them think their think, because he was busy enough thinking his own.
Then one night a large restless cat was prowling the Corofin countryside, full of discontent. She was in the habit on dark nights of coming up from the sea, where she lived nearly full time now. She rustled through the trees in front of the Magilla household. She stopped when she heard the talk. They didn’t see her large green eyes at the window and they carried on with their usual conversation.
What she heard interested her greatly. It made the slits in her eyes dilate and her heart race with excitement. As it happened, this cat was also not burdened with fondness for Fionn Mac Cumhaill. She hadn’t always been a cat but had been condemned to stay in that form for the rest of her days after coming out the worse in an altercation with Mac Cumhaill. She had initially crept down a well to search for the bit of her tail Mac Cumhaill had dropped in there – she needed to be whole if she was ever to come back to the human form she preferred.
Though she hadn’t found the tail, she had overcome her fear of water. From then on, she had taken to hunting in the sea where she liked the variety of food available to her. Feeding on oysters and salmon from around the river mouths of Éirinn, she started to grow beyond the bounds of a normal cat. So large did she eventually grow that fishermen who spotted the arch of her white back breaking the surface thought there was a large wave heading their way. Those who saw her head emerging from the water beat their way back to shore faster than they knew they could and never ever went to sea again.
She came to the door of the Magilla cabin and knocked softly, not wishing to scare these people into breaking out through the window or climbing up the chimney, as often happened when she called on a house unannounced.
‘Hold up, there’s someone at the door,’ said Dinny Magilla. They all suddenly started tal
king and laughing loudly about a hurling match, as if that’s what they’d been talking about all along.
‘Who’s there?’ said Bolg Magilla sweetly. Bolg was a cannier leader of the clan than the elder Magilla had ever been. He kept a keen eye on his health.
‘A friend,’ said the sea cat.
Dinny, who wasn’t the brightest of them, opened the door a crack and said, ‘It’s only some silver-haired auld one.’
Bolg came and talked through the door: ‘What do you want here, you scrawny old sack. Get away from this place. We have barely enough food for ourselves and we don’t have sympathy with careless old people here. We keep our dogs hungry and we’ll set them on you.’
‘Normally, the mouth that aimed such words at my person would already be crying in pain,’ said the sea cat, ‘but I will let it pass as I am excited to hear that I’ve finally found other people who think the same as me about Mac Cumhaill, bad ciss on him and all belonging to him.’
‘Oh,’ said Bolg, opening the door wider, ‘and how would that be?’
‘I think he’s a blister on the backside of this country, a plague that has got out of hand, a scourge on people who just want to get on with their business the best way they can.’
The Magilla mother, immediately recognising that the stranger was no ordinary beggar woman, rushed up to open the door saying, ‘A thousand apologies, come inside out of the cold and share our humble drink and food.’
There was a period of silence when the cat, as tall as the doorway, padded in. As a reward for mistaking the large lithe beast for an old woman, Dinny got a savage blow of a stool on the back of his head from his older brother.
The fine animal took no notice. She was not interested in their surprise or their quarrels. She walked over to the fire and sat down.
‘Well, the demons between us and all harm,’ said the mother, ‘but what on earth is happening?’
‘Stop your wailing, woman,’ said the cat impatiently.
Miley was shrewder than the rest. Recognising that there was nothing to be done about the cat’s presence since none of them had the courage to take a knife to her, he said, ‘Welcome to our home good lady.’